Thanks to information on this board, particularly the great instructions provided by Jem in response to Anoia’s recent restoration questions, I’ve been able to repad my own flute.
This is a five-key Skip Healy in blackwood. It’s one of his early flutes, and uses rod-system keywork similar to a Boehm flute. It was playable when I bought from a fellow C&F member several weeks ago, but the pads were obviously getting a bit old. I also wanted to see if I could do anything to make the Bnatural key cup lower. As you can see in the pictures, this key cup sits right between the T2 and T3 tone holes. My ring finger touches the cup when closing the T3 hole. When I first got the flute, this was enough to make A rolls difficult, and I sometimes had a hard time sealing the T3 hole in fast passages.
I don’t know if other players would have had the same problem; there might be something unusual about the geometry of my hands, or about my grip. In any case, I realized I wanted to make this key cup as unobtrusive as possible by repadding it with a thinner pad, and that I might as well repad the rest of the keys while I had it apart. From Jem’s instructions, I understood that leather-covered pads like those for saxophone were more appropriate for wooden flutes than modern flute pads covered with goldbeater’s skin. However, leather pads were going to be too thick, at least for the B natural key. Leather pads seem to be at least 3.5 mm thick. I found that the thinnest flute pads were 2.5 mm thick, and that piccolo pads got down to 2 mm. After looking at my flute’s tone holes, I decided their edges were round enough for the thinner pads.
I used a 2mm-thick piccolo pad for the B natural key cup, and 2.5mm pads for the other four. It took a while to find a shop that would sell me the pads, but I finally picked up the pads and a bit of shellac yesterday and repadded the flute last night.
I also added cork under some of the keys. You can see in the picture that the cork for the B natural key is pretty massive. This is because I wanted to limit how high the key cup could rise to the minimum at which it would work acoustically, to prevent it from interfering with my T3 finger.
So far, I’m really pleased. Lowering the B natural key cup has made a big difference. Overall, the flute seems better sealed, and low D sounds louder, and kicks in a tiny fraction of a second sooner.
Glad you found my blather helpful! 